Road maintenance

At VicRoads, we’re responsible for managing and maintaining 25,000km of Victoria’s major connecting roads and roadsides. These roads are the lifeblood of our economy, getting you safely to jobs and schools and home.

How does VicRoads maintain these roads?

To make sure our roads are safe and efficient for all road users, we undertake regular maintenance activities as part of our annual maintenance plan.

With non-stop traffic and seasonal changes all year round, our roads need care throughout the year. Each road has a unique life-cycle, meaning differernt kinds of works are needed at different times. There are three main types of maintenance works: routine maintenance, periodic maintenance and rehabilitation.

Routine maintenance

These works fix minor defects before they become significant problems. Routine works include repairing potholes, cleaning gutters and drains, repairing damaged signs and clearing litter.

Periodic maintenance

Resurfacing

These cost-effective works help us to preserve our roads and avoid more expensive rehabilitation works. These works include road resurfacing (sometimes called resealing) and corrosion protection for bridges.

How does resurfacing help?

Our roads are made up of layers, with the road surface sitting on top of a structural ‘road pavement’ layer (see picture below). When just the road surface is cracked or damaged, the pavement underneath may still be intact. When this happens, resurfacing the road can prevent further damage being caused to the underlying layer. This saves money and restores the road back to its original standard.

Rehabilitation

When the “road pavement” layer of a road is damaged, rehabilitation works help to restore the road back to its original standard. These works are more extensive, and they involve replacing both the pavement and road surface layers.

How we prioritise our works

To make sure we do the right maintenance at the right time, we use a strategic prioritisation system to identify the needs of each road. Based on this, we rate the urgency of works as:

Critical – works are needed to restore a road’s safety or productivity

Needed – proactive works are needed to prevent deterioration of the road in the short term (12-24 months)

Desirable – proactive works would help limit premature road damage and minimise the lifetime costs of the road.

What we've done

The majority of our roads were built 70 years ago, and they’re now due for renewal. A lot’s changed since then, so we’re rebuilding and updating our road network to suit our modern economy. In 2017/18 we:

doubled our maintenance budget

spent $500 million fixing Victoria’s roads and roadsides

mowed over 30,000km of grass

repaired 100,000 potholes

fixed over 13 million square metres of road.

What’s next?

There’s still lots of work to do, and we’re getting on with it. We’re spending more than $556 million this financial year to rebuild and update roads around the state. Keep an eye out for works on the road, and slow down to keep our workers safe.